General distro rant - linux newbie whine (yes, i want cheese ;)

2004-01-20 11:17:26 PMkylix0
I've been trying to get linux installed on an old laptop for about a week
now.
Its an old HP pavilion, k6-2 w/ 32Meg ram(not upgradeable), 6 gig harddrive
and
an 802.11b pcmcia card.
First I tried going with my friendly neighborhood Lindows, laptop edition.
It chugs along for about 15-20 minutes, then a screen comes up saying the
installation is complete,
remove all removable media and press any key to reboot. Well, apparently my
"Any" key is mislabeled,
because the machine is just locked up. So I do a hard boot instead, and
absolutely nothing is changed,
goes straight to the old Win98 boot up.
So then I went through a bunch of other distros, most of which it doesn't
even recognize the cd
in the drive for some reason or other( these include college, devil, a
couple of others), so then I started looking at floppy boot distros.
The first one I try says its especially made for boot up routers/NAT
firewalling, I give it a try
and it boots fine, finds my wifi card and lets me configure the IP for it
with ifconfig, I'M IN BUSINESS!!
Well, not quite, I wasn't quite paying close enough attention, this distro
doesn't let me alter the
harddrives, doesn't even let me SEE them, so back to Freshmeat I go.
I find a nice 22 meg rescue distro, boots up fine, lets me partition the
harddrive, install filesystems,UFDA!
Oops, ifconfig doesn't recognize the wifi card, sigh, back to Freshmeat.
Ok, lets go all out, grab Debian, since it seems to be the last of the
"truly" free distros out there with
bigtime support. Everything installs fine...except it doesn't even include
ifconfig.
erf, no more time today, the saga continues.
Mike

Bob { Goddard }

kylix Developer

2004-01-21 12:47:36 AM

Re:General distro rant - linux newbie whine (yes, i want cheese ;)

Mike Mormando wrote:
[...]

Quote

Ok, lets go all out, grab Debian, since it seems to be the last of the
"truly" free distros out there with
bigtime support. Everything installs fine...except it doesn't even include
ifconfig.
erf, no more time today, the saga continues.
Of course it includes ifconfig. Is in in your path?

Are you running as root? Have you installed the package
that contains it?
This is better taken to one of the Linux groups.
B
--www.mailtrap.org.uk/

pNichols

kylix Developer

2004-01-21 02:49:43 AM

Re:General distro rant - linux newbie whine (yes, i want cheese ;)

Mike Mormando wrote:

Quote

I've been trying to get linux installed on an old laptop for about a week
now.
Its an old HP pavilion, k6-2 w/ 32Meg ram(not upgradeable), 6 gig
harddrive and
an 802.11b pcmcia card.

Mike, try Suse 9.0. It seems to work well on my DELL.

However, if you want to save yourself a lot of time, try either the Suse
Eval which will run from the CD-ROM or Knoppix, which seems to find
hardware better than anything else I have tried, on Notebooks. If the CD
ROM finds everything, then you could feel pretty confident that the full
installs will work.
I like Suse best overall, however, Knoppix has a unique way of running from
the CD-ROM and allowing you to set up a partititon for caching, saving, and
loading your files, yet still run from the CD-ROM. I usually keep a Knoppix
CD-ROM for any recovery operations or running Linux on machines that have
Windows installed (when I am on the road) anyway. So, it is a gift for
machines you might be working on that do not have Linux installed anyway
and for any type recovery you may need (where you acidently fry a config
file, or accidently erase a boot loader, etc).

{smallsort}

R.F. Pels

kylix Developer

2004-01-21 02:09:12 PM

Re:General distro rant - linux newbie whine (yes, i want cheese ;)

Mike Mormando wrote:

Quote

I've been trying to get linux installed on an old laptop for about a week
now. Its an old HP pavilion, k6-2 w/ 32Meg ram(not upgradeable), 6 gig
harddrive and an 802.11b pcmcia card.
Forget this. Too little RAM.

--
Ruurd

pNichols

kylix Developer

2004-01-21 02:34:43 PM

Re:General distro rant - linux newbie whine (yes, i want cheese ;)

R.F. Pels wrote:

Quote

Mike Mormando wrote:

>I've been trying to get linux installed on an old laptop for about a week>now. Its an old HP pavilion, k6-2 w/ 32Meg ram(not upgradeable), 6 gig>harddrive and an 802.11b pcmcia card.

Forget this. Too little RAM.

Yikes, I missed the 32 meg of Ram.

Your options are pretty limited to non XLinux, or at best BlackBox as a
GUI..

Peter Agricola

kylix Developer

2004-01-21 05:03:55 PM

Re:General distro rant - linux newbie whine (yes, i want cheese ;)

"pNichols" wrote:

Quote

>>I've been trying to get linux installed on an old laptop for about a
week>>now. Its an old HP pavilion, k6-2 w/ 32Meg ram(not upgradeable), 6 gig>>harddrive and an 802.11b pcmcia card.>>Forget this. Too little RAM.>
Yikes, I missed the 32 meg of Ram.

Your options are pretty limited to non XLinux, or at best BlackBox as a
GUI..
He should try to get an older distribution. I've used Suse5 (with KDE) on a

486 with 24MB. Don't know hardware detection is good enough for a laptop.
Peter

Trane Francks

kylix Developer

2004-01-21 06:16:31 PM

Re:General distro rant - linux newbie whine (yes, i want cheese ;)

On 01/21/04 18:03 +0900, Peter Agricola wrote:

Quote

"pNichols" wrote:>Your options are pretty limited to non XLinux, or at best BlackBox as a>GUI..

He should try to get an older distribution. I've used Suse5 (with KDE) on a
486 with 24MB. Don't know hardware detection is good enough for a laptop.
Ouch. I tried an old Slack installation with mwm as the window

manager and, man, that was painful on a ThinkPad 230Cs (maxxed at
20 meg). KDE 1.0, IIRC, had a heavier footprint than mwm. Some of
the slimmer window managers might be okay at 32 meg (I thought
mwm was okay), but I wouldn't want to put KDE or Gnome on a
system unless double that were available.
YMMV and all that, but I wouldn't be looking at KDE on a 32-meg
system.
trane
--
//------------------------------------------------------------
// Trane Francks XXXX@XXXXX.COM Tokyo, Japan
// Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty.

Hilton Evans

kylix Developer

2004-01-21 07:44:45 PM

Re:General distro rant - linux newbie whine (yes, i want cheese ;)

Quote

I've been trying to get linux installed on an old laptop for about a week
now.
Its an old HP pavilion, k6-2 w/ 32Meg ram(not upgradeable), 6 gig harddrive
and
an 802.11b pcmcia card.
<snip -- the rest of the story>

Re:General distro rant - linux newbie whine (yes, i want cheese ;)

Quote

>Did you swallow all that propaganda about Linux' tiny memory>requirements. ;-)>

You can run Linux from a 360 K Floppy with just 2 MB Ram. I did try <g>.
So have I early on.

But of course not a standard distribution. "Tiny memory requirements"
only hold for your own self-generated special purpose distribution.
At one time I thought that was the hidden big niche market for Kylix.

Re:General distro rant - linux newbie whine (yes, i want cheese ;)

pNichols wrote:
...

Quote

>Forget this. Too little RAM.>

Yikes, I missed the 32 meg of Ram.

Your options are pretty limited to non XLinux, or at best BlackBox as a
GUI..

...

I installed SuSE 6.3 on an old Toshiba 8Mb RAM laptop for the intention
of being ued as a router which ran quite ok. All you need is a proper
swap partition and mount it during installation. There was not enough
hadrdrive space for x only +-420Megs..
Siegs

Peter Agricola

kylix Developer

2004-01-21 10:12:49 PM

Re:General distro rant - linux newbie whine (yes, i want cheese ;)

"Trane Francks" wrote:

Quote

Ouch. I tried an old Slack installation with mwm as the window
manager and, man, that was painful on a ThinkPad 230Cs (maxxed at
20 meg). KDE 1.0, IIRC, had a heavier footprint than mwm. Some of
the slimmer window managers might be okay at 32 meg (I thought
mwm was okay), but I wouldn't want to put KDE or Gnome on a
system unless double that were available.

YMMV and all that, but I wouldn't be looking at KDE on a 32-meg
system.
It depends also very much on your graphics card, more than on memory I

think. When I used that same motherboard/cpu/memory with a new and faster
harddisk to upgrade my 386, and a much lesser video-card was used, the
performance was terrible. I think the video-cards in laptops where far
behind desktops that days.
Peter

Mike Mormando

kylix Developer

2004-01-22 02:19:01 AM

Re:General distro rant - linux newbie whine (yes, i want cheese ;)

Quote

Did you swallow all that propaganda about Linux' tiny memory
Well, win98 did run fine on it, and several of the linux distros, in text

mode, which is fine.
I am really only looking at using it as a router with port forwarding, but I
need the wifi
network card working.
Tonight I'll take Paul's suggestion and try Knoppix, finally found a decent
download site in germany for it.(much faster than any of the US ones)
Mike

Michael Schnell

kylix Developer

2004-01-22 05:03:10 PM

Re:General distro rant - linux newbie whine (yes, i want cheese ;)

Quote

At one time I thought that was the hidden big niche market for Kylix.
That's not entirely wrong. We once did an embedded project to run on a

small embedded PC (2 MB Flash 8 MB RAM ). We tested the software using
Delphi and (after stripping the GUI) compiled it for Linux using Free
Pascal.
-Michael